How Firstup CEO Armyl Zaguirre grew Firstup to $100M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

jimmy sort of lost company to cox for about 350 million bucks had only about 30 million bucks raised in that company so a great big financial win for everybody him and his business partner who are great friends they've been doing it for many many years then figure out how to spin this new company out of cox which really helps internal communications across mega employees and big employee teams they have a about 20 of the global 200 using their platform with contract values you know on the low end in the hundreds of grands and all the way up to millions of dollars per year depending on the size and the growth of the team they raise 68 million bucks team of 200 based out there in san francisco g this is the top where i interview entrepreneurs who are number one are number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have i'm now at twenty thousand dollars per top five and six million he has helped on global domination we just broke our 100 000 soul mark and i'm your host nathan latka this episode 761 coming up tomorrow morning we went from james smith over 4 000 developers paid him to catch bugs and he's raised 9.5 million dollars how do you break into that space hello everyone my guest today is jim larrison he's the co-founder and president of a company called dynamic signal the leading customer and employee advocacy and engagement platform jim has been involved in a handful of startups that were successful from within big companies to pure venture funded businesses with a couple of sold businesses and an ipo he's excited for what's to come with dynamic signal which has already raised over 68 million dollars in funding jim are you ready to take us to the top sure we were joking it sounds like something you're like relaxing in a bubble bath right now with with some female artists blasting over the the stereo yeah it's beautiful music in the background all right tell us about dynamic signal what's the company doing what's your business model how do you make money uh sure so we founded the company about seven years ago with really with the mission to how uh sort of revolutionary how to communicate with your employees so you know as you know big companies struggle to communicate with employees especially people out in the field you have retail employees you have people in factories and reaching those employees is very difficult especially since a lot of them don't actually have email so what we've what our focus is is really making a simple way to reach employees with the right content at the right time and so the main problem that companies deal with that we're trying to solve is you have low engagement employees and on corporate internet people don't use the internet many times the attention spans are really low the contents out of date are not timely you look at companies that potentially are trying to reach employees through sending newsletters to their home uh or magazines to their home or posters who does seriously people do that every every large company that has employees remote will print four color glossy newsletters and mail them to their home gosh that's brutal okay well here's look the other side is people are going to go nathan this is slack slack has solved this problem how did you respond to that yeah so we actually work well with slack so slack is more of a collaboration tool it's a tool where people can employees come to communicate with each other and collaborate with each other this is more a top-down communication tool it allows companies to push content or news to employees and it's really targeted to speak to the employee about the company and something that they might be interested in versus an employee talking directly to uh the ceo you know i feel like jeff bezos obviously doesn't want a hundred thousand employees reaching out to him directly yep makes good sense and what's the business model is it sas yeah it's a sas model uh so monthly subscription based okay and give us a sense just a generic sense um you know are people pay i mean is this more of a small business tool or an enterprise tool what's the average kind of company paying you per month yeah so we have three segments we go after so we have a global business that really focuses on the global 50 right so we have a lot of customers like mcdonald's and ge as our customers those are very very large customers that pay us up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month and then we have an enterprise business that focuses on the global 1000. yeah those range in the 10 000 plus range for uh per month and then we have a corporate business that has people companies that have five thousand or less employees those typically range in the five to ten k per month okay got it and is the main factor that's driving these increases or decreasing contract value for you just number of seats based off number of employees yeah so a lot of times we'll our business model is to charge per employee group or number of employees we might have a corporate license if you're a smaller business where you just pay a fixed fee okay but it's because it's by employee the values by employees so that pricing is tied to employees and and dues a lot of times when i talk to ceos especially ones that are getting close to like 100 million run rate they'll have these cohorts built out and there are very different playbooks depending on the cohort and the acv on each of those cohorts a lot of them also that you they followed the nicely followed pattern kind of the 80 20 rule where for your case it'd be your global 50 make up more than 80 of your revenue but are less than 20 of your customers in terms of logo count is that is that the case with your business as well yeah probably i mean it's probably more of 70 30 versus 80 20. but yeah it's it's trending that way uh the big customers continue to grow and every quarter every year they're growing uh at sort of massive rates uh whereas the smaller customers have a tendency to sort of stay at the rate they're at when they start and when you say global 50 global 1000 like how do you determine those is that public does some big publication put those out or how are you measuring that um so we look at the number of employees so it's probably a generic term that we're using but we really look at we segment our customers based like on how many employees they have and then also segment them further based on where the you know how many employees they might have that are remote how many employees they have in factories how many employees they have that might be in a retail outlet uh and that helps us sort of guide what is is this a large business that our global team goes after for example nestle is a very large customer of ours nestle has hundreds of companies under the nestle brand and in each one of those they have divisions and subdivisions within the organization that makes this a very complicated problem to solve and so that's a global customer for us and that that cohort will pay anywhere between a hundred grand up to a million per month depending on the service they can pay you know there's no cap on it but uh for you right yeah exactly so your global let me break these cohorts down in terms of uh number of uh employees usually for each so global 50 how many employees typically uh you know that's a great question actually so global 50 probably would be some company that has 25 000 to millions of employees you know mcdonald's has close to three million employees okay and global global 1 000. yeah so global 1000 would be 5 000 to 25 000 and then five thousand less is the corporate okay makes good sense all right let's let's take our heads out of the sorry i took us in the weeds there for a second that's right take it back to the founding story so what year did you launch the company in uh let's see it was 2010. so we actually sold our pass company to cox enterprises uh me and my co-founders have worked together for about 20 years uh in a bunch of different companies and we sold addify was our past company we sold it to cox um what was the sale price it was about 350 million dollars okay is it bootstraps uh no we raised money we we were about three years into the business and sold it so it was a pretty quick exit uh but we had raised i think about 20 to 30 million dollars something around there sounds like though it was still a great return for everybody oh yeah it was great yeah and so while we were in cox we actually came up with this business model uh and the original idea actually is interesting it was to go after advocates and influencers and find a way to systematize the relationships that you have with those and so we worked with companies like general mills where they had bloggers in the cooking category and they would tap them to share recipes and talk about general most products what we saw though was that in companies like that and like oakley and nike the biggest advocates were their employees right and it was massive like the the engagement on these programs was off the map plus you can kind of force an employee to share an article about their own company right if it comes to the boss you're going yeah i guess that's true also but um they like to share it and we we have a whole gamification engine so there's points and leaderboards and all that good stuff so employees liked to share and talk about their company but they like the benefit of getting recognized also uh so let me assume let me ask you a question because your biggest thing is you already have a...